Making email-address optional in new staff-opened tickets?

In some cases we have incoming phone tickets from people without (or refusing to name) an email adress.

How can we enter that phone tickets w/o email? (beside entering a fantasy/internal mail address which we do now.) Did I miss an admin option to make mail addresses in staff-opened tickets optional somewhere?

Thanks for any advice and for the good work of all persons involved! :)

Comments

You could have staff use their own address when opening the ticket or you could have everyone use a specific fake address. (phone@yourdomain or refused@yourdomain) This would have the benefit of being track-able later for reporting purposes [presuming that your staff don't typo the address horribly].

Your other choice would be to alter the source and make it not required. It's important to note that making these changes listed just below will make email not required for everyone. I have no idea what this will do in v1.7x. People have done things like this in 1.6ST successfully.

1.8.x is a totally different beast and I have not looked at the code to see how compatible this type of change would be. Although I suspect not at all since email is no longer stored in the ost_ticket table and has moved to a separate place (ost_user_email). Also once client accounts are more fully implemented I'm not real sure what the db changes will be.

FWIW, I too need to be able to remove the email field requirement in v1.8. I'm new to osTicket and so far, I love it! But in this case, the client will be using it with a telephone hotline so all tickets will be entered by staff. When researching systems for this project, I had found the other articles in this forum that showed it was possible to use osTicket without the required email field, so we felt comfortable going forward with it. It's not a huge hiccup, but it would be great to see that optional user data sooner than later! :) Thanks!

This thread is from 1.7. There is no way to do what your talking about at this time in 1.8.1. However 1.8.2 should have the final move to First Class Users and will have actual usernames and passwords. I imagine that would then remove the necessity of having an email address for each Client (user) and have it be optional. Of course email is a major feature of osT so that might not be as optional as you would like. v2.0 will allow us to group our users, so maybe then you could use one email address for the group.

This is a major issue for us. We use OS ticket both as a traditional ticket system, but also as an internal job tracking system. Most of our customers are home users who don't give their email address. In other past versions we used the same internal email address for all of these customers. Now we are unable to use the same email for the different people.

The ability to not be forced to add an email address would be very welcomed.